Safar-nameh - Persian pictures - 1894

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Gertrude Bell

Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell CBE (14 July 1868 – 12 July 1926) was a British writer, traveller, political analyst, administrator in Arabia, and an archaeologist who mapped and identified Anatolian and Mesopotamian ruins. She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1917.

Bell and T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) helped to create the Hashemite dynasty in Jordan and define the outline of the modern state of Iraq. She had a role behind the scenes in the Arab revolt in World War I. At the conclusion of the war, she proposed borders within Mesopotamia to include the three Ottoman Empire vilayets that later became Iraq.

Book Description

This brilliant, vivid and impressionistic series of sketches, formed during her 1892 stay in Persia, is Gertrude Bell's first published work. Infused with a distinctive orientalism, Persian Pictures is an evocative, virtuosic meditation, moving sinuously between Persia's heroic, complex, mythical past and its present decline; the public face of Tehran and the otherworldly ‘secret, mysterious life of the East’, the lives of its women, its enclosed, quasi-medieval gardens; from the bustling cities to the lonely wastelands of Khorasan. Bell's documentation of Muharram – the month of mourning for Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed – and Ramadan, display a mind finely attuned to the differences and similarities between Islam and Christianity, East and West. Persian Pictures is both travelogue and meditation, an elegiac and beautifully observed account of a spellbinding land.

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